Cooking with Eggs

Today's cooking lesson was cooking with eggs. We made a varieties of dishes that used eggs in various ways including fritadas, biscuits, quiche, ice cream, soufflé, and fruit custard tarts. My partner Kalle and I made the ice cream and helped with the chocolate souffle. The only time I had ever made ice cream before was the science class way of making it in a coffee canister. This was a much more professional way of making ice cream and it tasted better to. We also didn't just make your standard vanilla ice cream. We made bacon ice cream! At first, I admit I was totally disgusted by the idea of putting bacon in ice cream. I am not the biggest bacon fan, so I didn't think it would go well with the ice cream. However after tasting the final product, it was much better than I expected. I don't think I would ever choose to order or make bacon ice cream over some other flavors, but it was definitely tasty.

The ice cream used the following ingredients:
2 cups whole milk
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon cornstarch
1.5 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1.25 cups heavy cream
2/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 vanilla bean (we used regular vanilla extract instead)

To add the bacon flavoring, we added:
5 strips cooked bacon
3/4 brown sugar sprinkled on the bacon while cooking
2 teaspoons dark rum

The first thing we did was to make the cornstarch thickening mixture by mixing 2 tablespoons of the milk and the cornstarch in a small cup. We then combined the cream cheese and salt in a medium bowl until smooth.

In a saucepan, we heated the remaining milk, the cream, sugar, corn syrup, and vanilla until boiling. Boil for about 4 minutes, making sure the mixture doesn't boil over. Remove from the heat and add the cornstarch mixture. Bring back to a boil and let boil for another minute, stirring while doing so.

Remove from heat and gradually whisk the milk mixture into the bowl with the cream cheese. It's important to whisk this very well in order for the cream cheese to completely melt and combine into the milk mixture. Pour this mixture into a large zip-lock bag and put into an ice bath for about thirty minutes. Ours cooled quicker than this, so we only needed to wait about twenty minutes.

While it was in the ice bath, we cooked the bacon in the oven with the brown sugar on top. I have not cooked bacon in the oven, but found it was a very easy technique. We put a wire cooling rack on top of a cooking sheet, so the bacon grease would drip off as it was cooking. It took about 15-18 minutes to cook completely.

Next, pour the ice cream into the frozen canister and spin the ice cream maker for about twenty minutes. Add small pieces of bacon to the mixture while it is spinning. Every ice cream maker is different, so the timing depends on your model. You will be able to tell when the ice cream is thick and creamy and ready to eat. The ice cream will still be very soft at this point, so it is best when frozen for a while. We froze ours for about an hour, but at least four hours would be best.

After we put the ice cream in the freezer, we helped make the chocolate soufflé. I always imagined this dish to be extremely complicated, but it was actually very easy. And our souffle didn't collapse! It remained perfectly puffed until we served it. We probably could have cooked it for a couple minutes longer to make it a little less gooey in the  middle. However, it was extremely tasty and would be a dish to impress with! It was also good experience learning about to beat egg whites to make them fluffy and separating egg yolks from the whites. I have pictures of the souffle with the fruit tarts in the background!

Overall, this was a wonderful cooking experience. I am convinced now that making your own pie crust is the way to go. It wasn't very complicated and tasted a lot better than the store bought version. I also want to make the biscuit recipe again, because I think those were the best homemade biscuits I've ever had. They took less than 30 minutes to make too! I am excited to have made these recipes and to try them again soon.

Also, be on the lookout next Wednesday in the Herald Journal! Reporters came while we were cooking to write a story about us. The photographer took lots of pictures of Kalle and me making the ice cream. I hope they include one!